Stephen Scott Smith, Seeyouyousee

Grab your mother’s keys, we’re leaving.

If you grew up in suburbia, the hairs on
the back of your neck are apt to stand up as you make your way through
the creepy Proustian labyrinth that is Stephen Scott Smith’s Seeyouyousee.
The installation meticulously distills the physical and emotional
essences of a typical suburban home, and it’s not a happy place. It took
Smith 60 days to construct this faux domestic interior inside Breeze
Block Gallery’s project space. With its gray walls and white baseboards,
innocuous carpeting and lone potted plant, it’s a dreary simulacrum of
the middle-class American dream—except it’s not appointed with
furniture, appliances or bric-a-brac like a real house. Instead, its
mostly spartan halls are punctuated with odd, simplified objects that
spur common childhood memories. A black rectangle mounted on a pedestal
stands in for a stereo speaker or the family TV; steel-capped fir planks
lean against a wall like oversized crayons; and a furry black cowhide
hangs from a hook, an abstraction of some garment you might come across
in your parents’ closet.

In a
cramped side room, a video monitor in the floor plays a slowly moving
image of an explosion, evoking the churning tectonics of childhood
growth itself. There is no privacy here: The home has no doors; walls
are cut through with slats; and closed-circuit cameras simulcast your
every move to screens in other rooms, so you better not jack off or
smoke weed in your room. Smith heightens this paranoid atmosphere with
an eerie soundtrack that drones from the rafters with staticky ambient
sounds, just below the threshold of recognizability.

In a 2011 installation called These Dreams,
Smith dealt with nostalgia in a cozier fashion, re-creating a 1980s
teenager’s bedroom, complete with Madonna and Prince LPs. His current
exhibit offers no such footholds for specific memories. It is a past
whose contours have blurred and blunted, a haunted house whose bogeymen
have no faces. In this unsettling installation, Smith implicitly replies
to Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again with a resounding “Why on earth would you want to?”